This paper argues that the kind of justificatory reasons that can be advanced within democratic polities are inherently office-relative. Offices are minimally understood as sets of rules and procedures meant to regulate specific types of socially relevant practices. My argument is structured as follows. First, I claim that the office-relativity dimension of justification can be construed in two different ways. It can, on the one hand, refer to an office-independent type of justification, i.e. a justification that is morally available to all the relevant agents in the absence of specific official constraints. It can, on the other hand, refer to an office-dependent type of justification, i.e. to a set of justificatory reasons that are not only available to, but also constraining for agents occupying particular official positions. I then trace the history of this analytical distinction back to Rawls’s distinction between pure and non-pure procedures and to Kant’s distinction between the public and the private use of reason. Finally, I conclude by arguing that, though analytically elegant, the distinction between office-independence and office-dependence is actually blurred in democratic polities by the existence of certain meta-procedures, such as constitutional control mechanisms or referenda.
